May 23 Music machine

Spotify is continuing down the acquisitions trail with its fourth purchase of the year. The latest buy is Niland, a French-based machine learning outfit whose talents are set to be deployed to help improve the music streamer’s critical discovery capabilities.

“Niland has changed the game for how AI technology can optimise music search and recommendation capabilities and shares Spotify’s passion for surfacing the right content to the right user at the right time,” Spotify says. It adds that the outfit’s “innovative approach” to AI and machine learning based-recommendation systems is “a perfect fit” for Spotify.

Niland is looking to go all AI on Spotify content.“Over the last four years, we’ve been a pioneer in the analysis of audio using deep learning technologies,” states the French firm. “We’ve achieved our vision of enabling computers to listen to music in a human way.”

Only last month, Spotify picked up blockchain specialist Mediachain Labs which it said would help it create “a more fair, transparent and rewarding music industry for creators and rightsowners”.

In March, Spotify onboarded MightyTV’s content recommendation system and us using the firm’s programmatic advertising and personalised recommendations to further develop its advertising products and “create native brand experiences”.

The first acquisition of the year was Sonalytic whose audio feature detection is used to improve Spotify’s personalised playlists and to help match songs with compositions to improve the company’s publishing data system.